British Library Crime Classics

While my go-to genres of books are SFF and history, I'm never averse to the odd crime, thriller or mystery novel. This is one of those interests I've inherited from my dad, and like him, my preferences range from John le Carré at the more literary end to trashy airport thrillers, though he traditionally opted for Tom Clancy doorstoppers, while my interests run to the pithier international thrillers, like Tokyo by Mo Hayder (which I read when I went to Tokyo).

More recently, he's developed a taste for British mysteries, after years of picking up Agatha Christie mysteries (presumably an interest he got from my grandmother), so whenever we've gone to Borderlands, an SFF bookstore we like up in San Francisco, he's brought back various books from the so-called Golden Age of Crime Fiction. I've skipped over the Dorothy L Sayers books he's gotten, grown concerned at the decay of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh books, and explored with interest the really obscure books he's bought from the British Library Crime Classics series.

This series is heavily focused on writers that have been largely forgotten and are long out of print. There are basically no names I've heard of before (John Bude, Freeman Wills Croft, Mavis Doriel Hay, et al), and the titles are what you might call stereotypical: The Cornish Coast Murder, The Santa Klaus Murder, Death in the Tunnel, Murder in the Channel. If a TV show like the Simpsons made fun of the British interwar mystery genre, these are the kinds of titles they might come up with.

The quality is also, to put it charitably, variable. I've read four of the books so far, and I'm at 2-for-2 of good vs bad. The first I read, Death in the Tunnel, while stolid and far from unpredictable, was at least well-constructed and terse, while Murder in the Channel was boring and afflicted by terrible prose. The Cornish Coast Murder benefited from its real-life locations (apparently a novelty in British writing back in the 1930s) but is dragged down by really rotten prose and dialogue. On the other hand, The Santa Klaus Murder is one that I resisted for the longest time, because it seemed to contain the worst excesses of the "cosy" mystery subgenre, but it's proven much better-written and, if not gripping per se, moderately well constructed (no spoilers, though, as I'm planning to finish it tonight).

What's interesting is how the series has resurrected all these books that have been forgotten since World War II, largely because the authors have been dead for decades. John Bude, for example, wrote about 30 mystery novels, apparently, but since he died in 1957 is unknown now (that, and the Cornish Coast Murder is pretty bad, as I said). Mavis Doriel Hay, by contrast, died in 1979, but she only wrote the Santa Klaus Murder and two other mysteries, all of which were also forgotten since she wrote on other non-fiction topics during her long career.

It just shows how it's generally hard to predict what will remain in print forty, fifty or sixty years in the future. Agatha Christie certainly created some entertaining and atmospheric mysteries, but is she really better than these other authors? Or to put it another way, if an author can churn out potboilers at the rate that John Bude did, it seems strange that they'd have gone so completely out of print. Though given how easily some SFF books fall out of print even these days, it's probably not that surprising.

The other interesting thing is seeing the mores of interwar Britain portrayed this way. You can obviously get that by reading Agatha Christie (just google the original title of her book, And Then There Were None), but it's still fascinating seeing that culture even in these little-known books. Bude's Cornish Coast Murder contains some whoppers, like suggesting that the murderer's erratic firing indicated a woman, while Hay's Santa Klaus Murder is full of class commentary about the murder victim's driver and secretary, though in the case of the latter, Hay does a better job of portraying those attitudes as wrong-headed.

Of course, there's also the fact that so many of these unearthed writers are women, which means characterizations are presented differently. Hay isn't quite as sexist as Bude, as you can imagine, and her female characters (and central romance) are better drawn. The genre is one that's always been heavily represented by female authors, so it's good to see that a number of these women are also being brought back into print; contrast that with Gollancz's SF and Fantasy Masterworks series, which republish some notable (if not quite forgotten) works in those genres, but almost exclusively by male authors.

As I've suggested, some of these books and authors deserve their obscurity, but if any of them catch your attention, they're worth a read. And for all that I've criticized John Bude's first mystery novel, I was sorely tempted to borrow the other three by him that my dad had on his shelf in Italy; in the end I left them there, for future lazy vacation reads.